


But My Aching Soul

by Lulzy (likelolwhat)



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Art, Character Death, Deathfic, Growing Old Together, Letters, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-25 22:49:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14987276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likelolwhat/pseuds/Lulzy
Summary: He used to sit on the porch and pen letters, bent over an upended fire log for his table instead of the perfectly serviceable writing desk inside. Letters, only a few of which would ever be sent.Many years after retiring to the countryside, Hawke gets sick, and Fenris deals with the inevitable reality of being alone again.Now with ART!





	But My Aching Soul

**Author's Note:**

> From [this prompt](http://dapromptexchange.tumblr.com/post/174890620584/as-fenris-and-hawke-grow-old-together-hawke) on the DA Prompt Exchange: _As Fenris and Hawke grow old together, Hawke starts to slow down and is often ill. His sickness progresses and Fenris knows that their time together will soon come to an end. He doesn’t know if he can bear being alone again._
> 
> Title from "Young and Beautiful" by Lana Del Rey.

We had a little cottage, high in the Fereldan hill-lands, far from anywhere of note but close to our hearts.

He used to say if he squinted from the porch on a clear autumn afternoon, he could see the village where he’d stayed two glorious months, him and Carver and Bethany and their mother and their father. We went, a few times for a few reasons, but like so many things it had been destroyed in the Blight and rebuilt unrecognizable. The people did not know him, more salt than pepper, still-strong hands around his ‘walking stick’, and he said many times that he wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

They recognized me, and I had no such qualm. We did not need them, I said, and that was that.

He and I built the cottage ourselves, with some help from Aveline — dear Aveline! She was gone too soon after — and even years later he would mumble into his beard about the crooked mantel that she put in. I never had the heart to tell him that it was me. It was his way of remembering her fondly, the big sister after losing the little one, both taken with none of the dignity they deserved.

A gentle home for two old fighters, with sturdy walls supporting a roof that never leaked, not once. Quilts everywhere, gifts from Merrill that we were grateful for on winter nights, even if the early attempts were… unconventional. As the years passed her skill, and our collection, only grew.

He used to sit on the porch and pen letters, bent over an upended fire log for his table instead of the perfectly serviceable writing desk inside. Letters, only a few of which would ever be sent. Quill to inkpot to paper, pause to chew on the nib, start again. Letters, to his friends and his enemies and people he’d never met. Though I had read every book I had ever gotten my hands on since he taught me, and I knew he wouldn’t care if I read one or all of them, I let them be. Sometimes he would look up at me, though, to where I sat at his side, as always, and though I was reading or mending a hole in a quilt or staring off into the distance sipping my tea, I would feel his gaze fall on me, and soften.

And he would ask me. Ask me what? What word he was looking for, if this word meant what he thought it meant, if that phrase was ‘too Fereldan’. If he needed a spelling, I’d bring down the well-thumbed dictionary and show him that yes, it was really a silent T, and we’d roll our eyes at Orlesians.

I didn’t have to read the letters to know they held his grudges, his fears, his hopes, and his passion in every penstroke. I could see it, just in his face as he tapped the quill against his chin. The beard would grow bushier as his hairline receded, but it was the same gesture across the years until he didn’t make it anymore. This was his, his catharsis and his ritual against a world that had tried to take everything from him.

The letters, those never to be sent, were carefully labeled and stored away. Boxes and boxes of letters, neatly left to gather dust. Most addressees shared their boxes, as most addressees got one letter and never more. Those close to his heart each had a box all to themselves, their piles growing across the years as he worked out his hate, regret and love. His family, his friends. Meredith who got his pity by the end, Trevelyan who got his respect, and Alistair who got nothing but had given him the most precious gift: _time_.

And me.

When the news came of Aveline — of the rock thrown as she took off her helmet to better address the crowd, not as an authority to struggle against but as a fellow Kirkwaller who had dreams, aspirations, a family — we held each other as we cried, and the next morning he wrote his last letter to her. I found him, standing out in the dew-laced field next to the little hole he had dug for Aveline’s box of letters, shivering in the pre-dawn chill as he drew the earth over the grave with magic. I watched him from the porch until the sun rose from behind the far hills, watched his shoulders heave and shake and then settle. When the rooster started crowing, he turned and came back to the house, to me.

We did not speak.

It was over a decade after that Isabela was lost to the sea, and that night we drank in her honor and that morning I woke with a raging hangover to empty space in our bed and knew what he was doing. I could even imagine what he had written in that final letter, for I felt it too. Of all of us, I’m sure she would find her own death most fitting.

Then Sebastian caught some wasting sickness while on diplomacy in Antiva and slowly dwindled down to dust, leaving no heirs and sending Starkhaven into another civil war. He had never liked Sebastian as well as I had, but he stayed up all night with me as I wrote my own letter, this one to go into the box with his. He let me pile the dirt over the box with my own hands, and I will always be grateful for the feeling of earth under my palms, burying my regrets symbolically, even as halfway across the known world my best friend was ashes in an urn.

Time passed quickly and quietly. Around the time Merrill’s yearly quilt arrived, her largest one yet and themed after the legendary golden halla of her people, I found him wrapped in it, and a dozen others, complaining of the cold though it was a balmy spring day, unseasonably warm. I trundled him off to bed, force-fed him tasteless but hot broth. I knew he would be fine when he had the energy to complain about it.

But after that he wasn’t quite the same. He caught colds more often. Even in the height of summer, he got one, sneezing into a handkerchief three times and blaming it on allergies he had never had. He took longer and longer to fetch water, and claimed he was ‘sightseeing’. He would hold me at night, but rarely more than that, promising ‘tomorrow’.

When his hands began to shake, I knew. When he knocked over his inkwell and burst into hysterics as ink blotted out his carefully crafted letter to Varric, I held him. Because he knew too.

Anders’ box we never buried, for we could never know which rumors were true. We heard a dozen times that he had been executed, and heard he had been spotted in a border town somewhere a dozen more after that. Truthfully, the world will likely never know what became of him after Hawke let him go. Anders probably died in a dank cave somewhere, alone and forgotten but for his legend, not himself, bones picked over for carrion. The thought… I do not know what to make of it. Or he reinvented himself, perhaps in Tevinter as he always wanted — except… except I know he did not actually want that — and let his old self pass into myth even as he continued on. I don’t know what to make of that thought, either.

He grew worse. I did not take him into town. I did not send for a healer. Is that selfish? I did not want them to see him as a doddering old man, did not want them to poke and prod and declare what we already knew: that there was nothing to be done. Because I knew that, to hear it aloud, that I would break. He was all the light and joy I had. He was all the reasons I had. Is that selfish, that I wanted to keep him to myself for the last precious time we had together?

He knew that, as his body was failing and had failed, that his mind would go too. He was no storyteller, he told me and kept telling me, but someone had to keep these memories. I think he was even then somewhat fading, but I dutifully did what I had not done before: I wrote his letters for him. Sat by his side of the bed, or at the writing desk as he dictated from the armchair, and wrote the letters with the emotions broken free from their cages by his failing health. To Bartrand, to his cousin Solona, to Feynriel — all people long dead but whose ghosts still haunted him. He even wrote to Knight-Captain Cullen — who, it was said, had retired to the countryside with Inquisitor Trevelyan and didn’t live all that far away — saying that only the Maker could offer absolution but he could offer forgiveness. He said to send it when he was gone.

And to Merrill and Varric, he spoke until my hand could barely hold the quill anymore. To them he sent his boundless love. To them he sent his memories of them, and his wishes for their happiness.

And then there were the things he left only for me. These he did not dictate, but shared into the darkness of our bedroom long into the night. I held his hand, fragile as a newborn bird, under the covers as he whispered memory after memory. I did not need the words to know he loved me, but these he said too. Could I survive, without this man beside me?

One night as we lay abed, like so many nights before, he told me about the village on the far hill, and his family in the last months they would be whole. Good memories, happy memories. His father, so tall and strong and proud. So like himself, just in a bygone time. He turned out a lot like his father, he mused to me, but he held an anguish in him that did not come from something forever lost.

_I love you_ , he said. _Good night_ , we said, as we had so many nights before.

X

I knew, before I opened my eyes, that he was gone.

He was smiling in the eternal sleep, peaceful and somehow so full of promise that it would be all right. I brushed his cheek one last time, and got up.

Already the house was so empty. I dressed, joints creaking, and stepped out onto the porch.

“He’s gone, then?”

It was Merrill, perched on the swing, legs drawn up under her chin. She aged, too, though I hadn’t seen her in many years. Her hair was longer, and white, but the layers of wrinkles couldn’t hide the vallaslin, nor could cataracts completely cover her sparkling eyes. Her head peeked out from over a cacophony of colorful wool scarves.

I nodded, too tired to be properly surprised.

She turned her head from me, watching the sky. “I’ll help you with the pyre, if you need it,” she offered, though her voice trembled. Perhaps looking away helped her, too.

“Thank you.”

She uncurled, and followed me into the house. Neither of us were strong enough alone, though he was half the weight he was when we had met. Together we managed to wrap him in linen, and carry him to the field. Though I did not tell her, she led us to the unmarked, open area where we had buried the letters. On rough dirt where nothing grew, we laid him down.

Merrill looked at me, then across the rolling hills through the misty morning haze at something only she could see. My throat would not open. She held out her hands.

As the fire engulfed him, my love, my everything, Merrill opened her mouth and sang.

And I felt, in that lament in a language I had never bothered to learn, all the years at once. My years, his years, our years, and the eons gone by unremarked. It came, with a crushing oneness and a gentle sigh. It bore me down into the soft dirt, cradled me like a lover as I gasped out my soul, wailed at the incomprehensible solitude of carrying on. Still the song poured out of her, and the flames. I screamed, I wept, I raged against the unfairness of it all. I was alone.

X

“You should know,” she said, walking back. “I was visiting Varric a week ago. He’s gone, Fenris. Dropped dead one day with no warning. I rode as fast as I could to beat the courier, but it…” She trailed off as I opened the door and walked inside, leaving it open for her to do whatever she pleased. Did it matter, anymore?

She looked around the house, at our comfortable clutter. At the various knickknacks gifted to us over the years by our friends. A mermaid figurine. A crooked mantel. Quilts. I sank into his armchair, the one closest to the fireplace, and thumbed the golden halla’s antlers. Merrill, ever restless even in old age, puttered about. I let her be.

Until she found the letters.

“What are these?” she said, holding up Varric’s box. I glanced over and started, having forgotten about them.

“Those—”

“Oh, this one is yours!” she exclaimed. She put down Varric’s box and picked up mine, looking at it from all angles. “Oh, it’s got a note on it.”

“Give that to me,” I snarled, getting up as fast as my joints would allow and grabbing it out of her hands. The note, pinned to the top, fluttered. I looked down at it, read it, only dimly aware of Merrill looking over my shoulder.

“Oh, da’len,” she breathed.

_Fenris,_

_I know I will someday leave you. I will leave you as my father left my mother, as Bethany left Carver, as my mother left me…_

That last night, I had thought it grief for his long-dead father in his voice, in his eyes.

I know better now.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The art is by my friend [Norroendyrd](http://norroendyrd.tumblr.com/). You can view the post on Tumblr [here](http://norroendyrd.tumblr.com/post/175114340518/merrill-and-a-romanced-fenris-go-through-hawkes)!


End file.
